CAKES!
In our spare time between sheds and weddings and other sheds, we make cakes. The first night Guy and I ever went on a ‘date’ I discovered he had a degree in art. At the time I was making a Gocku cake thing and I had the Gokhu (nope, still can’t spell it) cut out in sugar paste but was putting off the ‘adding features’ bit on the basis that if I did it he would end up looking like one of the Mister Men rather than a fearsome Japanese warrior… I mentioned to Guy that he might like to help and, in one of those ‘early relationship don’t want to say no’ moments he agreed… And so it started… We really only make cakes for friends, and friends of friends. Oh, and work colleagues… we seem to know a LOT of people!
That's our wedding cake - or at least the top bit of it!
Here’s our favourite chocolate cake recipe – from my mum, which is why it’s called Jill’s Cake. Her name is Jill. Obviously.
225g (8oz) Plain Flour
50g (2oz) Cocoa Powder (not drinking chocolate!)
1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda
¼ tsp Salt
275g (10oz) Caster sugar
100g (4oz) Soft tub margarine (Stork is excellent)
¼ pint (5fl.oz) mix of half milk half water
2 large eggs
Method (very technical): Bung all of above in a bowl and mix vaguely together. Then beat for ONLY 1 minute – either with an electric beater, or use a wooden spoon and an awful lot of energy… Pour the mixture equally into two 8” round cake tins, and chuck in the oven (180 degrees) for about 25-30 minutes. Ish. When you take it out of the oven, leave it in the tins for 5 minutes, then turn out and cool on a wire rack.
OK, that’s the cake bit. Now if you want to decorate it in a truly spectacular fashion and have everyone saying ‘you are soooo CLEVER’ (works for us) here’s what you do:
Make up chocolate glop: 6oz soft marg, 8oz icing sugar, 1oz cocoa powder. Whizz it all up together in a mixer. Or if you’re not totally knackered from beating the cake (see above), do it by hand… Stick some of it between the two layers and put the cake on a board or plate. Plonk the rest of the icing on the top and sides of the cake, quite thickly. Now stick Maltesers into it. And that’s it. Honest. That’s all there is to it. Trust us – your friends will ooh and aah and say you are SO clever, and you tell them it’s dead easy, and they don’t believe you. Works every time!
We also do decorated cakes too…
This is 'Pete's Pheasant' - it was a cake for Pete who, er, had a pet pheasant. And tartan slippers...
This one is pink and has '21' written all over the sofa - you'll never guess what we called it! Yep, 'Pink 21st'. So maybe we're better at cakes than names... Guy did the cute little dog...
Just to prove we're better at cakes than names, this one is called 'Tank'.
And when we finished the pool we just had to make a cake... No, my chest isn't really that big...
This one we cunningly called 'Blod's Boat' as it is a boat and it was for Blodwen...
We call this one 'Polo' which is a bit rich, given that it's neither white nor has a hole in the middle. However, it does look very like my niece Gemma... who plays polo! We really must get better at these names...
We don't really 'do' formal wedding cakes, although our friend Anna has suggested an entire white Malteser cake for her wedding next September… now that would be FUN! We did do this one for Charlotte... including Davey, their greyhound. It had to travel all the way to Scotland - and it arrived unscathed!
And we have one (very good) claim to fame – we made John Barrowman’s cake for his civil partnership ceremony with Scott in December 2006. We’d seen John on the Jonathan Ross show saying that they were having the ceremony, and that they didn’t have a cake, so we both thought it would be a hoot to ‘do’ his cake… we emailed some pics to his web site, he got in touch a few weeks before the big day, we met up at the New Theatre in Cardiff where he was rehearsing for panto, and that was it!
We delivered the cake on Boxing Day to the hotel so that John and Scott could see the room all set up and, luckily, they loved it! The ceremony (and the cake) were featured in OK magazine a few weeks later – it was VERY tempting to tell anyone we saw reading it ‘we did the cake’… but we managed to restrain ourselves! We’re not planning on doing any more celebrity cakes – that was a complete one-off because John looked like he’d be fun – and he was. He’s a thoroughly charming guy, and Scott was lovely too – and it was HUGE FUN! We have, however, been introduced on occasion as ‘them wot did that bloke from Torchwood’s cake’. Fame indeed…
